In “The Family,” Robert De Niro stars as a former mafia boss living under witness protection in France. Despite his FBI handlers’ incessant admonishments to lie low, he just can’t stop killing and maiming people for offenses ranging from poisoning the watershed to selling him rotten lobsters.

But he never harms innocents — as he explains in the memoir he’s typing up at his latest hideout in Normandy — because “all my sadistic urges are satisfied when I cause pain for a good reason.”

His wife, played with an intermittent Italian accent by Michelle Pfeiffer, isn’t the in-denial innocent we’ve been trained to expect. When she overhears the local grocer bad-mouthing Americans, she uses her MacGyver skills to improvise an instant fire-bombing.

Their two kids also are gifted when it comes to mayhem. The 17-year-old beauty going by the alias Belle Blake (“Glee’s” Dianna Agron) is positively gleeful while beating a local boy with a tennis racket after he gets a little handsy in the park. Meanwhile her little brother (John D’Leo), at 14, already is skilled at espionage, forgery, bribery and assault with a deadly weapon.

This dark would-be comedy is the latest effort from French director Luc Besson, whose credits include the highly entertaining “Nikita,” “The Professional,” “The Fifth Element” and, after that, a whole lot of nothing. One wonders what his countrymen would make of the film, considering that it seems to justify its title characters’ misdeeds by portraying their Gallic neighbors as arrogant oafs or scab-faced doofuses. Because everyone knows that ugly on the outside equals ugly on the inside, right?

Demeaning their victims is a crude way of drumming up sympathy for the, ahem, heroes of story, but it doesn’t really succeed. Sure, De Niro’s character doesn’t always act on his murderous impulses; sometimes he merely imagines them. But while the fantasy-violence shtick was hilarious in “High Fidelity,” when it played out in the mind of an unassuming record-store owner, it is somewhat less amusing to share in a mass murderer’s daydream about forcing burning coals down someone’s throat.

Based on Tonino Benacquista’s novel “Malavita” — retitled “Badfellas” for English readers — “The Family” does have its entertaining moments. But anyone who thinks it’s a real knee-slapper needs therapy. Stat.

Reach the reviewer at kerry.lengel@arizonarepubic.com or 602-444-4896.

Posting a comment to our website allows you to join in on the conversation. Share your story and unique perspective with members of the azcentral.com community.

Comments posted via facebook:

► Join the Discussion

Join the conversation! To comment on azcentral.com, you must be logged into an active personal account on Facebook. You are responsible for your comments and abuse of this privilege will not be tolerated. We reserve the right, without warning or notification, to remove comments and block users judged to violate our Terms of Service and Rules of Engagement. Facebook comments FAQ

Join thousands of azcentral.com fans on Facebook and get the day's most popular and talked-about Valley news, sports, entertainment and more - right in your newsfeed. You'll see what others are saying about the hot topics of the day.